RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS
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floats with simpering mannequins on them, and uniformed bands
preceded by bare-thighed drum-majorettes whose crudely direct
but unformed sexuality is pathetically innocent of art or sublima–
tion. There is no pollen for fertility, no piety toward the six direc–
tions, no assumption in dance of the personality of the god. Catholic
schools and colleges, such is the total impress of a culture, try to
outdo their secular rivals in football and fife-and-drum corps, in–
stead of encouraging the development of liturgical dances and the
carving of holy images. For the communal and artistic expression of
traditional religion one visits the pueblos of the Rio Grande rather
than the bleak, bingo-playing Catholic parishes of Massachusetts and
New Jersey.
Along with the impoverishment of the popular imagination by
industrialism, urbanization, education and the mass media, has
developed a corresponding and compensatory interest on the part
of artists, intellectuals and social scientists in folk customs and my–
thology. But a purely nostalgic or rational interest in such matters
merely increases the sense of contemporary barrenness. The uncon–
scious demands emotion, participation, belief. Without it we have
the deadness of large parts of
Finnegans Walee,
despite Joyce's
mythic erudition.
If
folk customs are to be maintained there must
be at least half belief,
ex opere operato,
in their magic efficacy.
Residual power must be granted the holy relic. The mystery drama
must evoke the Real Presence. Religion needs myths, and myths
cannot be manufactured; even those of Blake, Joseph Smith and
Yeats were set down at the dictation of angelic voices.
If
the wish is strong enough and the unconscious cooperates,
men-intelligent men, great organizers like the Mormons-can be–
lieve almost anything; or, as with Madame Blavatsky's
Secret
Doctrine,
almost everything. But there are pragmatic elements in the
choice, and those beliefs are properly preferred which create the
most organic social community and preserve the fullest realm of
traditional meaning. It is more natural to become a Roman Catholic
than a Zuni, though the American social tradition is opposed to
both. Roman Catholicism represents the most complete and viable
synthesis of Western religious practices from the basest to the most
spiritual, only the overtly sexual being suppressed. Curiously enough
it is the rationalists of the irrational, like Freud and Frazer, who
